Sunday,
April 12, 1998
Easter Sunday
Jim Todhunter
"The Mary of Easter"
John 19:25-27; Mark 16:1-8; Acts 1:12-14
In a few moments we will be hearing a glorious musical work by the young Mozart: "Regina Coeli" (Queen of Heaven). Why, you might ask, are we celebrating Mary, the mother of Jesus, on Easter Sunday, especially in a Protestant Church? The traditional imagery stresses God the Father raising Jesus the Son. The last time Mary appears in the Gospels is in the scripture from John. She stands at the foot of the cross, next to the Beloved Disciple, perhaps John himself. Jesus says to her, "Woman, behold, your son!" Then he says to John, "Behold, your mother!" Jesus sends his mother to live thereafter in the shelter of the household of John. It is as if Jesus is saying from the cross, "Mother, behold, your new son!" "Son, behold, your new mother!"
One of the most abiding artistic images of Mary is the pieta, the sorrowful Mary cradling in her lap the body of the crucified Jesus. The scriptures make no mention of Mary being with the body of Jesus, yet the Pieta has become a beloved part of our tradition. The next and last appearance of Mary in the New Testament is in the first chapter of the Book of Acts, where she has joined those gathered in the Upper Room, including the disciples and the brothers and sisters of Jesus. They have all returned from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem. Together they had witnessed Jesus' ascension into heaven.
Psychologists tell us that there is no stronger nor more enduring human bond than that which exists between mother and son. It is the most intense and complicated. While the father-son imagery of Good Friday and Easter shapes our tradition (Jesus addresses God the Father from the cross), we are reminded that even as God the Father has lost his son, so also Mary the mother has lost her son. Knowing that his death is at hand, Jesus says good-bye, and also provides for her well-being in his absence. He gains closure on this most intimate, intense human relationship. He lets go of his mother. In the image of the PIETA we see the weeping mother about to let go of her son.
The symbols of Holy Week and Easter deal with the movement of death to life, loss to celebration, the darkness of Good Friday into the glorious dawn of Easter, sickness to healing, sorrow into Joy. Good Friday is about suffering. Easter Sunday is about the bursting forth of new life. What is the role of suffering? We associate suffering with the emotional anguish of physical pain, the pain of the nails in Jesus' hands and feet, the wound in his side, and the crown of thorns upon his head.
But it seems to me that Good Friday is also about the pain of letting go, the pain of detaching from important relationships and even from life itself. In this matter of pain, our Buddhist friends can help us better understand our own Christian tradition. For Buddhists, the source of most suffering in this life is attachment. We go through life collecting things that we become attached to. We become attached to possessions, a home, a job, a self-identity. We become attached to people - family, friends, loved ones. We become attached to what we call the "good life" and all that goes with it. We collect all these and more, great and small, tangible and intangible. Are the things we are attached to bad? Not necessarily. They may be very good. A beloved spouse is a blessing. A loving home is a blessing. A secure community is a blessing. It is impossible not to have such attachments. But, what happens is that eventually, we begin to grasp, we grow to clutch these attachments. And the more we we clutch, the more we fear. The harder we clutch, the more we worry that we cannot live without what we are clutching, and the more we fear their loss.
For the Buddhist, the goal is freedom. And freedom comes from the realization that all attachments in life are temporary. It is simply a fact that no attachment lasts forever. All will end. In this understanding the Buddhist seeks to detach. The detachment from all such earthly attachments must happen if we are to experience freedom. Understood this way, death itself is no longer to be feared. To undergo such detachment is always painful. But it is necessary to undergo such pain in order to truly experience freedom.
Is all this so different from our Christian understanding? I think not. Jesus himself endured the cross, not because he believed suffering was good, but in order to experience true life. Jesus experienced the pain of letting go of life, in order to receive the gift of new life.
Those of you familiar with 12-step programs know that it may be crucially important for one to "detach" from a family member who has an addiction. This detaching is not ceasing to love that other person. It is letting go of our clutching relationship, our attachment. It is letting go of that person in order to truly be for that person. It is really the letting go of our inner compulsion to control, letting go of the belief that that person's happiness is in our power to provide. To detach from a person we love, even though we know it is for their good and our good, is tremendously painful, because it feels like we are rejecting that person, it feels like we are saying good-bye forever. Yet, mysteriously, we may find that having said good- bye, we now greet them in a new way. Jesus said, "Those who give up their lives, will find their lives." All that has been given up will be regained.
I think that the story of the Mary of Easter is the story of how mother and son each had the courage to detach from one another. Jesus' good-bye was delivered from the cross. And in the image of the Pieta we see the sorrowful Mary bidding her painful farewell.
But the purpose of detachment is not to suffer. The purpose is to experience freedom. And there are two images I would like to close with that symbolize this freedom, this new life. One biblical, one not. In Acts 1, there is this marvelous reunion. It is like an extended family gathering. In the Upper Room all the disciples have come together. These are the same disciples who fled in fear, who denied Jesus. Their attachment was not to him but their own safety. But now they are here. And also present is the family of Jesus. We know that at one point Jesus had rebuked his own family for thinking they had a special relationship with him, that they could be insiders by virtue of family ties. They are nowhere to be found at the crucifixion. But now they are here. And here is Mary herself Mary's last appearance in the Bible is at this gathering following Jesus' ascension into heaven. His departure brought them together. The promise of the coming of the Holy Spirit will keep them together.
The final image is an odd one. In 1950 the Roman Catholic Church approved the doctrine of the ascension of Mary, body and soul, into heaven. As I understand it, this teaching states that, at her death, God accorded Mary the special status of not having to sleep in death until the resurrection, but that she, like Jesus, was immediately lifted into heaven. Whether this has any meaning to Protestants as a literal reality is frankly questionable. But its symbolic importance is potent. It is almost as if we can say that as the earthly Jesus, the man of flesh and blood, was bodily raised into the Risen Christ, so the earthly Mary, the mother of Jesus, was bodily raised and transformed into the Queen of Heaven, the "Regina Coeli."
A powerful symbol. A symbol of the feminine aspects of the divine, and in that sense a power that is available to us even now, the opportunity for prayer and appeal to God the Mother, as well as God the Father. Perhaps even the spiritual muse for the young Mozart. But, at the same time, it is also a symbol of the reuniting of Jesus and Mary, the reestablishment of their loving relationship in all its uniqueness. To be united in the resurrection they had to experience the pain of detachment, the anguish of separation, the sorrow of good-bye. But this was not the final word. God always has the final word. And God's final word is LIFE. AMEN.
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